Burning alive - latest tactic in Iraq violence
Revenge-seeking militiamen seized six Sunnis as they left prayers and burned them alive with kerosene in a savage new twist to the brutality shaking the Iraqi capital.
The violent deaths came a day after suspected Sunni insurgents killed 215 people in Baghdad’s main Shiite district.
Iraqi soldiers at a nearby army post failed to intervene in yesterday’s assault by suspected members of the Shiite Mahdi Army militia or subsequent attacks that killed at least 19 other Sunnis, including women and children, in the same neighbourhood, the volatile Hurriyah district in northwest Baghdad, said police Captain Jamil Hussein.
The gruesome attack, which came despite a curfew in Baghdad, capped a day in which at least 87 people were killed or found dead in sectarian violence across Iraq.
In Hurriyah, the rampaging militiamen also burned and blew up four msques and torched several homes in the district, Hussein said.
President Jalal Talabani emerged from lengthy meetings with other Iraqi leaders late yesterday and said the defence minister, Abdul-Qader al-Obaidi, indicated that the Hurriyah neighbourhood had been quiet throughout the day.
However, Imad al-Hasimi, a Sunni elder in Hurriyah, confirmed Hussein’s account of the incidents. He told Al-Arabiya television he saw people who were drenched in kerosene and then set on fire, burning to death before his eyes.
The Association of Muslim Scholars, the most influential Sunni organisation in Iraq, said even more victims were burned to death in attacks on the four mosques. It claimed a total of 18 people had died in an inferno at the al-Muhaimin mosque.
The extreme violence continued to tear at Iraq’s social fabric even after the government had banned pedestrians and cars from the streets and closed the international airport until further notice in anticipation of a storm of retaliation for the five bombings and two mortar rounds which killed 215 in Sadr City on Thursday.
The airport closure forced Talabani to delay his planned departure for Tehran today for meetings with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Iranian leader also invited Syrian President Bashar Assad, but it now appeared he would not attend.
The chaos also cast a shadow over the Jordan summit next week between Shiite Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and US President George Bush.
Politicians loyal to radical anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr threatened to boycott parliament and the Cabinet if al-Maliki went ahead with the meeting. The political bloc, known as Sadrists, is a mainstay of support for al-Maliki. The Mahdi Army is the organisation’s armed wing.
Sadrist lawmaker Qusai Abdul-Wahab blamed US forces for Thursday’s attack in Sadr City because they failed to provide security.
“We say occupation forces are fully responsible for these acts, and we call for the withdrawal of occupation forces or setting a timetable for their withdrawal,” Abdul-Wahab said.
A US helicopter patrolling above Sadr City came under intense fire from the ground and shot back, wounding two people last night, according to police 1st Lieutenant Qassim Mohammed and witnesses.
White House spokesman Scott Stanzil said there was no change in the president’s plans to meet al-Maliki on Wednesday and Thursday.
Mortar fire rained down again on Sunni Islam’s holiest shrine in Baghdad, the Abu Hanifa mosque in the Azamiyah neighbourhood, wounding at least five people.
Several mortars crashed into the area on Thursday night within hours of the attacks in Sadr City, one of them puncturing the dome of the shrine and damaging the interior, including its library.
Also, militia gunmen raided a Sunni mosque in the Amil section of west Baghdad, killing two guards.
And in Baqouba, 35 miles northeast of Baghdad, Sunni insurgents blew up the dome of the important Shiite mosque of leading cleric Abdul-Karm al-Madani.
In the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar, 23 people were killed and 43 wounded when explosives hidden in a parked car and in a suicide belt worn by a pedestrian detonated simultaneously outside a car dealership.
Altogether, 56 people were killed across in Iraq yesterday, and police said they found 31 bodies dumped throughout Baghdad, most of them tortured before being shot.
In Sadr City, cleanup crews continued removing remains of the dead from wreckage of the car bombs.
Hundreds of men, women and children beat their chests, chanted and cried as they walked beside vehicles carrying the caskets of their loved ones toward the holy Shiite city of Najaf for burial. Despite Baghdad’s curfew, al-Maliki, himself a Shiite, ordered police to guard the processions.
